Online gaming ethics and mores...

Great Debates
1

So in this thread about role playing games, there arose a discussion(starting on post #63) about the legitimacy and relative assholery of actually role-playing an evil character in a MMORPG.

Essentially one side was of the opinion that if the system allows for evil actions like thievery, robbery and murder, then players ought to be allowed to play characters who do that, as it’s an entirely valid and realistic role to play as a character.

Others took the position that those evil acts basically lessen or ruin others’ playing experiences and should be eliminated, or at the very least, a player who’s role playing an asshole is just as much of an asshole as the character he’s playing.

But that’s also true in other games as well- people HATE “campers” in FPS games, because it’s considered unsporting for some reason, even if it’s often a very smart way to play. Sniping is similarly derided in many games for the same reason.

Does this kind of thing fall under the same category? It’s arguably assholish, definitely ruining some people’s gaming experiences, and explicitly allowed and enabled by the game engines, especially in the case of sniper rifles, scopes, etc…

I guess I draw a bigger distinction between myself and my characters and/or get less attached to them, so that if someone does murder them, I’m not totally butthurt about it.

What do you think? What are the parameters of online assholery and video games?

2

Online rules and offline rules are the same.

I am allowed to go to a park and hold a LARP there. I could roleplay an evil guy–let’s say, a Klansman–who liked to go around shouting racial epithets.

Other folks who came to the park for a different reason might have their day ruined by my roleplaying in the park. But hey, I was just roleplaying, and park rules allow me to do that! Why would anyone consider that obnoxious?

Not a close enough analogy? Consider: in college I was in a Vampire LARP group. At one point I and some others played a group of extra-evil vampires; we were conducting grisly rituals. I, a big fan of Clive Barker at the time, CliveBarkered up my description of the ritual site when some other players asked what we were up to. Turns out that’s not to everyone’s taste: it was clear from some facial expressions that what was good clean body-horror fun for me was actually disturbing for them.

So I stopped.

I could have stayed true to my character, continued telling people about the gory rituals we were enacting. But that would have ruined their time. So I found a different way to roleplay, a way that enabled everyone else to have their own fun while I had mine.

Were I really wanting to play a Klansman in a park, I’d find a way to do it that didn’t disturb other folks around me. Maybe I’d play a secret Klansman having surreptitious meetings or something (I dunno, I can’t imagine wanting to play a Klansman).

Were I really wanting to play an evil character in an online MMORPG, I’d spend a lot of time plotting with my fellow villains. Then I’d go find some NPCs somewhere and beat up on them.

You say you separate from your character more than other people do. On the contrary, I don’t think you separate enough. You need to separate what your character does from what you do, and recognize that while playing an evil character is fine, doing it in a way that ruins real people’s fun is not fine. Ruining real people’s fun is never fine.

3

I think you have to separate two concerns here: intended and unintended player actions.

For the sniper example, that’s an intended action, and should be allowed. Most of the time when people complain about intended actions what they are really complaining about is that they suck at the game and the guy that put in the time to master the sniper rifle is beating the snot out of them. That’s not the fault of the guy using the sniper rifle.

Similarly, if you’re playing in a PvP game and you’re stupid enough to walk past an ambush point and a clever player jumps out and stabs you in the back, it’s your own damn fault for not planning an escape route. You’ll learn better next time. After all, if you weren’t supposed to get stabbed in the back by other players, the game wouldn’t be PvP.

But that brings us to unintended consequences. The devs may have intended to allow a one on one ambush, but a 10 man bandit party wasn’t something they anticipated. And that either leads to people never venturing out of the safe zones until they are strong enough to get away, taking the long way around, or traveling in bands of 30 just to get from town to town. That quickly leads to a lot of players abandoning the game, which is definitely not what the devs want.

Similarly, camping a spawn point was probably not anticipated by the devs, but doing so means that people are going to stop playing the game if after their first death they respawn for 0.3 seconds before getting blasted by a camper.

Speaking as a developer (although none of the games I’ve written have been commercial), I generally think the solution here is technical rather than social. You have a problem with players forming bandit clans? Allow some form of fast travel to avoid them, or let players hire guards for a trip between towns, or something. I played one game where bandit clans were allowed, but the devs also put in place a system where a police clan could be formed, and players could roleplay a cop that could hand out warrants on a player (or their alt) to make the bandit clan unable to return to town. It was a social solution with a technical side, and it worked very well without adding too many “unrealistic” options.

Similarly with camping - the solution is variable spawn points, or spawning only outside LOS of an enemy player, or getting 3 seconds of invulnerability after spawn, or something.

That doesn’t mean you can’t be an asshole in a game. Getting on voice chat and exclusively talking about how you porked my mom last night would make you an asshole even if that’s allowed by the game. Exploiting an obvious bug to one-shot a player in PvP makes you an asshole. But if you’re playing the game as intended? Not an asshole, but maybe something the devs need to rethink.

4

Evil dudes who steal from the group and kill other Player characters are evil assholes- and so are their characters.

Loo, by doing so, you’re abusing the Golden Rule- RPG’s are a GAME. You can only have Fun if you play. Thus, when bringing in a character, everyone lets you in asap so that you have more fun.

Of course, in reality they’d carefully check out any newcomers- what with Detects, divination and the like. So, if you wanna sit there for a couple game nites, doing nothing while that goes on, yes, we could allow that level of 'realism".

You’re being a jerk, plain and simple.

5

MMORPGs, especially in early days, were intended to be as wide open as a park: you go in, you find your way to make fun. That’s different from a game like Team FOrtress 2, where everyone entering the game knows that the rules are to try to kill the other players and/or to advance specific objectives (which is generally made easier by killing other players).

Team Fortress 2 isn’t like a park, it’s like a game of chess. In chess, if I discover a new stratagem that’s amazing, nobody can say, “No fair! That’s dirty chess!” as long as I’m following the rules. Same thing in an explicitly pvp game: I figure out a good way of killing the other time, all’s fair.

But a game like Ultima Online was played by plenty of people who weren’t interested in the PVP aspect of it, but the game lacked a means for turning it off. It was much closer to a park where people went for all sorts of reasons. And so park rules apply more than chess rules: you need to balance your right to have fun against the question of whether your fun is going to ruin it for others.

In some cases, by all means do your thang. You want to practice your play, and other folks want to meditate? They’re probably going to have to meditate elsewhere.

But if your fun depends on ruining their fun, that’s when you’ve certainly crossed the line. They want to meditate, and you want to make fun of the hippies? Too bad: you don’t get to do it.

In bump’s example, he treated other players as unwilling props in his own game. They were objects upon which he had fun. He didn’t care that they weren’t enjoying it; they were necessary to his ideas of fun. That’s pretty classic unethical behavior.

6

I think the open-world sandbox zombie apocalypse game DayZ (and similar games) is a good case study on game ethics.

Basically there is no “point” to the game except for survive however you can in a massive wilderness/urban map full of players and zombies. I use the term “full” loosely as even on a full server, the map averages about 1 square mile per player.

One common complaint by the very vocal community is the preponderance of players who do nothing but camp at spawn points and locations of interest with high powered weapons or patrol around in bands, often in vehicles killing any new player they come across.

The main beef seems to be that this isn’t a Call of Duty style first person shooter. Originally "bandits’ interacted with players in the context of the roleplaying of the game (i.e. rob them, take them deep into the map and make them fight to the death). But now the general consensus is that it’s just players quickly gearing up then racking up kills on helpless players.
IMHO, that sort of trolling and griefing is a feature of the game, not a bug. It’s supposed to be a sort of George Romero / Walking Dead post apocalyptic wasteland so I think anything goes. Everyone wants to be Rick Grimes. No one wants to be some random jerk who gets his head smashed in by Negan. In reality, unless you play with some friends, you are just some idiot who happens to be walking through while those two towns are at war with each other.

This is a game of long boring hours spent tediously searching through abandoned towns for supplies, interspersed with moments of terror followed by glorious relief or unadulterated rage. It is the lack of a “safe zone” that makes this game stand out. The sheer size of the map is a “safe zone”.
Really it’s up to the game designers to balance the game to create the desired play experience.

7

If you don’t like PvP, play on a PvE server. Problem goes away.

If you’re headed for a mineral node, and somebody swoops in and starts mining it before you get there, well, that’s too bad. Find another mineral node.

It’s a different thing if he’s screaming or swearing at you. Then report him. But the problem here isn’t that he’s playing like an asshole, the problem is that he’s talking like an asshole. You can just mute him too.

Lots of griefers can be fixed by technical solutions. If your game doesn’t allow you to mute specific people, that’s a bug. If your game doesn’t allow you to kick players out of your group, that’s a bug. If your game allows team-kills, or sandbagging, and there’s no way to get rid of the griefer, that’s a bug.

Other things like spawn camping have technical fixes too. Why is the map set up so that a sniper as a line of sight to an enemy spawn point? That’s a bug in the map.

And there are some games that are set up as PvP. If you don’t like PvP, don’t play that game. It might be annoying that there’s a game you kind of want to play, but the game doesn’t support the kind of play you wish it did. There are hundreds of other games though. And almost all games have a PvE feature, or at least let you play against bots rather than humans.

It does suck when a game has flaws that allow griefers to ruin it for people. The solution is to fix the bugs that the griefers are exploiting. There’s a difference between enjoying PvP and being a griefer. Shooting everybody on the other side isn’t being a griefer, it’s playing the game, and if you don’t want to play a game where the other side gets to shoot at you play a different game.

8

Let’s be real and say that there were a lot of things in Ultima Online that were a product of developers not really understanding the MMO market yet. It wasn’t a bad game for it’s time, but it definitely had flaws that later MMOs corrected. One of those flaws was lack of distinction between PvP and PvE servers. An unintended consequence, and one developers of later games fixed.

If you’re upset about a bandit attacking you in a PvP only game, the problem is you, not the bandit.

UO was not like a park, where if someone is upsetting other patrons those patrons can call the police. It’s more like the Wild West: enter as your own peril. That you’re upset you didn’t correctly gauge the peril involved doesn’t make the other person an asshole, IMHO.

9

I think this is a key point. If the players choose to play in PVP mode, they can get what they asked for. If the players have no interest in PVP, or if the PVP’s matchmaking process is so broken that it makes playing the game impossible, then you have a problem. If the players are actively exploiting flaws in the game to “grief” or interfere with the regular players, then that’s even worse. UO was broken in many ways, but many of the flaws revolved around the devs underestimating the extent to which players would be dicks and subvert the intent of the game. UO also had a nearly vertical experience curve, by which a new player was utterly at the mercy of older players (not just in terms of player levels, but also thanks to a completely disastrous money/equipment system).

But here’s an interesting counter-example:

When I played EQ, my character was a Paladin (Definition: Good Guy). I got my character up to the point where I was able to fight the town guards surrounding the Dark Elf city (Definition: Bad Guys). I argued that because I was a Paladin, it was only right that I should fight the bad guys. My brother (who played a Dark Elf) pointed out that other Dark Elf players were relying on those guards to be present, and so by killing them I was indirectly screwing with someone else’s gaming experience.

So who would you say was right? In hindsight, I think my brother was correct. Regardless of what the game does / does not permit, at the end of the day you are playing with / against another person who paid money for the game and is taking time out of their day to play it. They expect to be able to play the game the way the devs intended, and it is wrong to rob them of that. (Even if you are only doing so indirectly.) This is why it is better for games to have dedicated PVP zones or servers, where players can consent to PVP combat if they choose.

10

This is an issue with Elite Dangerous’s so called “Open” mode as well, with wealthy and well-equipped commanders supposedly role-playing “pirates,”* mainly by ganking newbies and blasting player trading ships that aren’t fit for combat. Seal-clubbing, basically.

The emergent gameplay in response has been groups who, for nothing, defend the newbies and traders. This has had mixed success.

Mainly, people learn to play in Solo mode instead of Open.
*The real RPers leave the newbies alone and demand cargo from the traders before opening fire, of course. Little of this in evidence, actually. Mostly it’s interdict, blast to smithereens, lolz.

11

Huh. See, the people in the Wild West who shot other people over nothing? I think they were assholes. YMMV.

The PVP/PVE distinction is important, when it exists. Someone who goes onto a PVP WOW server and kills other PCs is just playing the game as it’s meant to be played (with rare exceptions, see the Funeral Raid example from the other thread).

But the salient features of bump’s example are these:

  1. The game did not allow a non-PVP option.
  2. Nevertheless, the bulk of people entering the game were not interested in focusing on PVP, and players like bump knew that.
  3. bump came up with a way of playing that worked only because that wasn’t other folks’ focus. We get into some Kantian ethics here: if everyone were playing with bump’s playstyle in mind, people would have behaved very differently, making bump’s raids impractical. He could only do it because most people chose not to do it.
  4. bump’s fun was also only fun for him because it wasn’t fun for other people. He wanted to play someone evil, which meant he had to simulate evil actions, i.e., actions that make others suffer. His simulated actions didn’t cause real grief (see what I did there?), but they did make other people’s day less fun: the game they played wasn’t fun for them, because bump had intentionally made it less fun for them. That was the entire point of his exercise.
  5. bump could have found a way to have fun that wasn’t at the expense of other people’s fun. For example, he could have gotten his group organized into rival gangs to fight each other in the alleys of the city or something. He decided to be a fun-predator. Or he could have threatened people, done the whole ambush thing, and then dropped character briefly to tell them that he wanted his evil character to make their innocents suffer, but didn’t want to ruin the game in real life for them, so he’d take a donation of whatever size they thought appropriate, or else take a hilarious joke or a funny dance, as “tribute”–then go back into character and be all “your money or your life, maggots.”)

It’s necessary to analyze what he did as a real-world person. He entered an environment in which people were having fun and engaged in an activity deliberately designed to ruin their fun, all because he thought ruining their fun would be fun for him.

Not okay.

12

I’ve had a report that this would be better in The Game Room. For the moment, I disagree. There’s an interesting debate possible here vis-a-vis role playing vs the player.

Go forth with my blessing evil ones.

13

But what if he did it to collect loot?

I think you’re assigning a little too much weight to his motives. The other players whose fun he’s ruining don’t care about his motives. Like Chihuahua said, suppose they were dark elf characters and his character was a human paladin, and they were the “evil” character and his character was on the side of good. Would that make it OK for him to grief them, because he was roleplaying a good character?

The point is, the problem was that the game allowed unlimited PvP with no way for lower level characters to avoid high-level bandits. The fix is to expand safe zones, or allow PvE servers, or put in safe gryphon flights for low level characters, or whatever.

In a PvP world you have to expect gankers. It might be annoying to get ganked, but ganking low level enemy players is not being a griefer. If new players can’t actually play the game then the game is broken, and the developers need to change the balance. Blaming other players for PvP when PvP is part of the game doesn’t make sense.

14

The guys who shot people and took their stuff in the real-life Wild West? Also assholes. Just because there’s no formalized structure in place to punish people for being jerks doesn’t make being a jerk okay.

It’s a mistake to compare UO to contemporary online games. Today, there’s sufficient market segmentation, and enough generally understood genre conventions, that ensure that the people who buy DayZ or EVE Online know exactly what they’re getting into when they buy the game. This wasn’t the case with UO. Nobody expected the game to turn into a 24/7 PVP bandit war as soon as the servers went live. It certainly wasn’t marketed as such. The majority of people who played the game expected it to be basically like the single-player Ultima games. At least, I know that’s what I expected, and I was following the development of the game pretty closely at the time. I ended up returning it a week later, because players like bump made it impossible for me to enjoy the game I wanted to play, instead forcing me into playing a game I had no interest in playing at all.

15

Not online or a MMORPG but in the game Galactic Civilisations, the hardest option is to play Evil when all the other civilisations are set to Good.

16

But consider that a major part of most MMORPGs is wandering into monster dens and slaughtering them and taking their stuff. From the perspective of the NPC monsters, you’re the asshole.

But that doesn’t matter, because those are NPCs.

But…it’s hard to avoid treating enemy players as just another NPC. You slaughter thousands of weaker NPC goblins for a handful of loot, how is that different from slaughtering weaker player characters for more loot?

But agree that UO doesn’t seem like it was designed correctly, and game designers are learned a lot since then. If I started a new WOW character on a PvP server I wouldn’t cry because some level 100 player ganked me as soon as I stepped out of town. But that’s because you only lose a minute or so of time if you die. And the other player doesn’t even get an honorable kill. And you can just wait for the timer to reset and you’ll respawn at a graveyard instead of where you died. And the other player doesn’t get to loot your corpse. Or you could reroll on a PvE server. And so on.

So gankers can make the game a wee bit frustrating, but they can’t ruin the game for you. Technical solution to the problem.

17

If it’s allowed by the developers it’s fair game. No-one is forced to play a particular video game and if the parameters are perceived as unfair or annoying the customer can vote with his wallet.

18

Before Ultima Online, Diablo II was a very popular hack and slash game. At first, it was primarily PvE, but there was a toggle where you could “go hostile” and then attack other players. It was one directional - only one player needed to declare hostilities. Since I played hardcore mode, death was permanent - meaning one death could be the loss of 10s or hundreds of hours of play. People who engaged in PvP essentially made it so public gaming was dead for me - all games were private.

Being a jerk is being a jerk - playing in a way that enjoyment is derived from the suffering of others in a way they haven’t agreed to is griefing and is totally jerkish. PvP games have implicit agreement that the other players are there to kill you. Sniping and camping is fair game.

19

Ultima Online is the perfect example. At the time the developers had no idea what level of jackassery and exploitation the player base was capable of. UO is probably my most frustrating game of all time at the time I played as a noob. I got pk’ed so often it wasn’t even funny. I still don’t trust people with no shirts and wearing jester hats to this day.

But eventually the UO developers realized that the system they put in place wasn’t ever going to work as intended and was vastly unpopular and they did the right thing by splitting the server(s) into two parallel universes.

20

I agree it’s jerkish to play the game in an unintended yet hostile way. Most online games can patch out or monitor that behavior in theory though and at that point I put the burden on the developers to implement disincentives or barriers to antisocial behavior they disapprove of.